Alaska brewery to use spent grain to power its production plant

Joshua Berlinger, Associated Press02.05.2013

Six-packs of beer are displayed at the Alaskan Brewing Co., which installed a boiler system that burns the company’s spent grain the accumulated waste from the brewing process into steam that powers the majority of the plant’s operations.

JUNEAU, Alaska — The Alaskan Brewing Co. is going green, but instead of looking to solar and wind energy, it has turned to a very familiar source: beer.

The Juneau-based beer maker has installed a unique boiler system to cut its fuel costs. It purchased a $1.8-million furnace that burns the company’s spent grain — the waste accumulated from the brewing process — into steam that powers the majority of the brewery’s operations.

Company officials now joke they are now serving “beer-powered beer.”

What to do with spent grain was seemingly solved decades ago by breweries operating in the Lower 48. Most send the used grain, a good source of protein, to farms and ranches to be used as animal feed.

But there are only 37 farms in southeast Alaska and 680 in the entire state as of 2011, and the problem of what to do with the excess spent grain — made up of the residual malt and barley — became more problematic after the brewery expanded in 1995.

Alaskan had to resort to shipping its spent grain to buyers in the Lower 48 states. Shipping costs for Juneau businesses are especially high because there are no roads leading in or out of the city; everything must be flown or shipped in. However, the grain is a relatively wet byproduct of the brewing process, so it needs to be dried before it is shipped, another heat intensive and expensive process.

“We had to be a little more innovative just so we could do what we love to do, but do it where we’re located,” Alaskan co-founder Geoff Larson said.

But the company was barely turning a profit by selling its spent grain. Alaskan Brewery gets $60 for every tonne of it sent to farms in the Lower 48, but it costs $30 to ship each tonne.

So four years ago, Alaskan started looking at whether it could use spent grain as an in-house, renewable energy source and reduce costs at the same time.

While breweries around the world use spent grain as a co-fuel in energy recovery systems, “nobody was burning spent grain as a sole fuel source for an energy recovery system, for a steam boiler,” says Brandon Smith, the company’s brewing operations and engineering manager.

It contracted with a North Dakota company to build the boiler system after the project was awarded nearly $500,000 in a grant from the federal Rural Energy for America Program.

The brewery is expecting the system to be fully operational in about a month’s time. Smith estimates the spent grain steam boiler will offset the company’s yearly energy costs by 70 per cent, about $450,000 a year.

Alaskan makes about 150,000 barrels of beer a year. The beer is distributed in 14 states after recent entries into the Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota markets. It brews several varieties of beer, but is best-known for its Alaskan Amber. The company is also known for its distinctive beer labels, including featuring a polar bear on its Alaskan White Belgian-style ale.

When asked which beer’s spent grain burns the best Smith said, joking: “we’re still trying to figure that out. We have our suspicions.”

Smith said he hasn’t been contacted by other breweries regarding implementing the project, but “absolutely” believes the system could be applied at other, bigger breweries that dry their spent grain.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, has been selling its spent grain for the past century to farmers.

Mike Beck, director of utilities support at Anheuser-Busch InBev, says spent grains are not a viable energy source for its breweries. However, Beck noted the company regularly investigates new technologies to see if they could be applicable to its operations.

Anheuser-Busch InBev does employ bio-energy recovery systems, which turn wastewater into biogas, in most of its U.S. breweries. This provides up to nine per cent of the fuel needed in its boilers, he said.

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